And Now for Something Completely Different

I have an announcement to make, which might come as a shock to and disappoint a lot of people.

I am not British.

Sorry, but I never have been and never hope to be. Not even if the United States’ electorate were to go completely and totally bonkers and elect Sarah Palin as President with Michelle Bachmann appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

For the record, in my youth, I married an Englishman. These things happen. These things – marrying foreigners – have always happened. Since the United States has been an independent country, we’ve always intermarried with our former colonial owners. We’ve even had an English First Lady. No less than one Adams, John Quincy, son of one of the major Founding Fathers, himself, married an English lass, albeit one who had an American father, and when he won the Presidency, there she was, ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and lording it over Washingtonian society as the First Lady of the land.

So take that, Jackie Kennedy.

In the late 19th Century, impoverished British aristos came, cap and hand, to the United States, courting the industrial heiresses of the East Coast new monied families. The Vanderbilts craved a title for their daughters and the Dukes of Marlborough, bluebloods of Blenheim, craved more than just a little bit of that tacky new American money to help sustain their chunks of stone and lujo lifestyles.

So when I married and went to live in England almost three decades ago, I wasn’t emigrating, per se. I was simply going to live where my husband lived and worked, and that’s the way it’s remained since then.

It’s not my home. It’s the place where I live and work. It’s the place where I pay exhorbitant taxes.

Lately, in fact, since the election of Barack Obama and the seemingly interminable discussion about healthcare, I’ve read a lot of comments made by a lot of Americans who seem to be giving up the ghost on America in general and looking, languishing and longing to live abroad, more or less because (and this is their reasoning) of the free healthcare.

Honestly, I read that so much I wanted to scream and scalp myself. And if I wasn’t reading that, I was reading about how much cleverer, intelligent and better educated all Europeans are. For everyone who’d ever complained about our President’s perceived apologising and bowing to foreign powers, these wailings were not only butt-clinchingly craven, they were totally ignorant.

Here are a few facts, and they’re not difficult to comprehend:-

1. Healthcare in Europe is not free. It never was. It’s funded through higher taxes. In fact, the French expect to have one-third of their salary witheld in order to pay for their government-funded health insurance, and that health insurance only covers 65% of their total costs, necessitating a hybrid system consisting of a 35% private top-up via employer-related health insurance.

2. Sorry, but sometimes in the UK, which has the Queen Mother of all single-payer systems, healthcare is rationed, depending on how well or how badly your local health authority has managed its government budget. And your healthcare won’t get you a private room, either, in the event of hospitalisation, or a lengthy consultation with a high-powered specialist physician or surgeon. No Harley Street for you, mate.

So that’s the healthcare debate in a nutshell. Let’s look at some other myths, shall we?

For years, I’ve listened to Bill Maher go on at length about the stupidity of Americans. I know what he means. A lot of other people do also, but it doesn’t mean that those of us who “get” Bill have to nod our heads like the dogs adorning the parcel shelves in the back of our cars and agree mindlessly.

“Yes, Bill, we’re stupid.”

“That Bill! He nails it every time. We sure are stupid.”

“Bill Maher’s right. We’re a nation of morons.”

“Yes. Bill’s got it. We’re stupid. Hyuck, hyuck.”

First of all, when Bill Maher makes a remark like that, he’s including himself. He has to be, simply because he carries an American passport. It’s meant as a wake-up call, a piece of reverse psychology. He wants us to look at ourselves and better ourselves intellectually, to understand and question and not accept blindly.

Secondly, stupidity doesn’t recognise geographical borders. There are stupid people the world over. Take a stroll with me through happy-clappy Europe, and I’ll show you stupid in four different languages.

And the equivalent of rednecks and lowlifes. The Josef Frizls of the world in Austria, who keep their daughters barefoot, pregnant and in the cellar as sex slaves to their own depravities. The slack-jawed slut of a mother of Baby P in London, no less, who made her beautiful son’s 18-months of life a living hell and still hopes to be released from prison to live with her partner in crime. The mother of Shannon Matthews, who “arranged” for he brother to kidnap the child and keep her drugged, hoping to mount a national search and reap a five-figure reward for finding the child. That happened in the industrial North of England. The McCanns, a husband-and-wife medical team, who left their three toddler children alone sans babysitters in a Portuguese resort. Whilst they revelled, “someone” kidnapped the oldest child, who hasn’t been seen to this day.

Pretty stupid, right?

And trivialities too. In Britain, the golden boy of the moment, Nick Clegg, acquired the nickname “LegOver Clegg” when – in a vain attempt to portray himself as au courant with the misogynistic lads’ pub-and-pull culture that’s rampant in Britain now, boasted in an on-air television interview to having slept with at least 30 women before marrying his wife. As if that were relevant. In Britain, obviously, it is.

Or Nicolas Sarkozy, who, within a couple of months of his second wife leaving him, stood before the magistrates’ marital altar about to marry a woman who’s chief claim to fame in Europe is that she’s a veritable continental mattress, who always goes to the highest bidder, and that she’s lining up a suitable successor when, next year, the little President is defeated at the polls, because it isn’t in Carla Bruni’s agenda to retire to the Parisian banlieux as bourgeois Mme Sarkozy – not after having graced the arms of Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and having culminated her horizontal career as Mme la Presidente. Rumour has it that Woody Allen’s interested in reviving whatever film career she once hoped to have. We’ll see.

There’s a General Election coming up in the UK on May 6th, with each of the three major political parties here claiming “Change you can believe in.” Sound familiar? The third party perennial bridesmaid Liberal Democrats, who are neither particularly liberal nor Democratic, are heralding an amnesty on all illegal immigrants (of which there are many in the UK) and a closer relationship within the bosom of the European Union – which, for many British, means a ceding of sovereignty to the Brussels gravytrain, and economic subservience to the old enemies of Germany and France. Mr LegOver preaches to the the inspired youngsters, desperate for an Obama of their own, by saying that “the young ‘get’ Europe” in a way the old don’t.

Yes, they do. They “get” the fact that Europe is a place of sandy-beached holiday resorts with thumping, throbbing clublife, 24-hour drinking and sex on the beach with strangers, cheap booze and cheaper accommodation, so that when they return after the requisite two weeks of sun, sand and sex, they can high-ass it to the local clinic for treatment of a nasty rash or smelly discharge in an unmentionable area.

If there’s an immigration problem in Europe, there are other problems too – like alcoholism in the UK or cocaine abuse in Italy. Like racism.

Racism’s there too.

A Norwegian blogger on HuffPo begs and pleads for Americans to keep their Tea Party ambassadors away from the Right Wing of his country. A British woman with a Russian name who lives in Switzerland rounds on me on a Facebook page and spews venom about the fact that Britain is ruined culturally because of its increased Americanisation.

“The Britain I see now,” she cries, “is nothing like the Britain where I grew up 40 or 50 years ago.”

Wow, to me that says only one thing … the Britain of 40 or 50 years ago was white. The Britain she sees and deplores today is a haven of multiculturalism and a myriad of colours. And that’s America’s fault, of course.

So she sits safely watching from afar in homogenous Switzerland, tax haven of the wealthy, who’s just passed national legislation prohibiting the building of mosques by their newly-arrived and ensconced Muslim community, which reinforces Mr Liberal Finnish Blogger’s plea.

It’s a poorly disguised secret that an undercurrent of racism is rearing its ugly head (like Putin before Palin’s gaze) in Scandinavia, due primarily to the fact that they now have a tranche of immigrant society which isn’t blonde-haired, blue-eyed and fair-skinned. It was the Danish, who were responsible for the Mohammed cartoon fiasco, and that was as much a racist connotation as a religious one.

Having lived this side of the Pond for nigh on three decades, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing older societies bleat on and on about hopeless American racism and pointing to their own perceived tolerance as evidence of their moral high ground.

Then, suddenly, America elects Barack Obama, and the cognitive dissonance leaves the Euros speechless. They’re suddenly all so desperate to be Barack’s new BFF or frantically searching for one amongst their number to approximate their own great white hope of an Obamawanabee, that they’ve neglected to address the incipient racism within their own borders - the illegal immigrant question washed daily up on their beaches or stowed away in the bowels of tractor-trailer trucks or in the undercarriages of high speed trains, the legal economic immigrants who head West as far as they can legally go and who are welcomed with open arms by businessmen who’ll pay them a fraction of the wages indigenous people demand. Add that to the ingredient of a working-class element who feels increasingly disenfranchised by all the major political parties within a country, and chances are someone with a pejorative motive will step from the shadows, mouthing platitudes these people are longing to hear, with assurances that the speaker feels their pain and is listening. What’s happening in the States now with the ridiculous Teabaggers got its start in a more inauspicious and down-played way some years ago in Britain when the old skinhead National Front got booted and suited up by a prep school-educated Cambridge grad and turned into the British National Party – but fascists they are, and fascists they remain, even though their followers are the children and grandchildren of the very people who fought against that ethos. And their driving force is racism.

So, spare me the tales of woe about wanting to move to Europe and its happy-clappy socialism. It’s not happy or clappy and it’s NOT socialism.

Let's All Be Thankful for Bob McDonnell

In the wake of the governor of my home state literally making Virginia the whipping boy for the nation’s collective guilt still felt about racism, I’d like to say a few words regarding this.
First of all, I did not vote for Bob McDonnell. Bob McDonnell does not speak for me. I did not authorise him to have my mandate. Neither did 44% of the people in Virginia who voted last November. That said, I did vote. In fact, I got my ass on a transatlantic flight and timed a holiday so that I would have a chance to pop by the polling booth that Tuesday morning and cast my Democratic vote; but a lot of people who lived in the state, simply couldn’t be assed to do so.
The day before the election, a politically astute friend of mine called it correctly. Deed would lose, he said, because the two demographics who ensured that the state went blue in 2008, simply didn’t intend to turn up at the polls – and those were the first-time voters (aged 18-24, specifically) and the African-Americans, many of whom – including Sheila Johnson of BET – were supporting McDonnell. The indendent tranche went red as well.
This entire election was a prelude of the Massachusetts senatorial election two months later; and as much as the media and the usual suspects whose agenda it is to ensure this Presidency fails (the Hamshers in bed with Grover Norquist and Whoreanna Fuckington), would like us to believe that both elections were an indictment of the President and his policies, more than anything the results were down to the Democrats having fielded weak candidates and low voter turnout.
That Virginia got duped is in no doubt. I’m someone who’s long judged books by covers, and I’ve been right on that accord more than I’ve been wrong. I had George Bush pegged as the failed, obnoxious frat boy he turned out to be, and I saw McDonnell quickly for the plastecene poor man’s Ted Haggard with the Stepford wife and requisite number of kids. He had a ready smile and the eyes of a fundamentalist. The minute the Washington Post published a picture of him campaigning under the Confederate flag, alarm bells should have gone off in the minds of every registered Democrat and Independent in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Two months after that, in August 2009, WaPo again scored by publishing extracts from McDonnell’s doctoral thesis, obtained at Pat Robertson’s Regent University – which is a euphemism for advanced Bible school. This was the infamous thesis consigning women to a future of being barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen and deploring the existence of homosexuals in society.
If alarm bells didn’t ring with the Confederate flag, they should have been blaring at that moment, and they should have turned into a cacophany when McDonnell told a bare-faced lie and attributed such writings to the folly of youth. That, upon investigation, it turned out that such ideas had been committed to print when McDonnell was a man of 35, married and with children, begs the question: When exactly does youth end and emotional maturity begin?
When McDonnell signed the nefarious document, proclaiming April “Confederate History Month” without as much as referring to the question of slavery being the ultimate driving force behind the Civil War, he not only made Virginia, the first English colony, the Mother of Presidents, and the home of the writers of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, the laughing stock of the entire nation, he also condemned all her citizens to be judged by his standards.
Reading comments on various threads in Facebook and Huffington Post, I now realise that, as a Virginian, I’m supposed to be ignorant, dumb, illiterate, gun-loving, retrospective, fundamentalist Christian, a rube, a hillbilly, a ‘goober’, a dolt, a member of the great unwashed. Also, as a Virginian, according to some, I am a racist. My state, along with the entire South, should secede. In fact, the Union should have allowed us to secede in 1861. Indeed, the United States would have been much, much better and the Confederacy would have been (in one commentator’s words), “the stinking shitheap that it is today.”
Gee, thanks.
It’s nice to be loved.
So love, in fact, that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, both, came in for some pretty strong invective, as did former governors Tim Kaine and Douglass Wilder. Kaine’s condemnation of McDonnell, according to the erstwhile sitting atop the hill of moral superiority, didn’t go far enough. Well, how “far enough” is far enough? Kaine’s tenure as Governor ended three months ago. He condemned the action. He deplored it.
Wilder, on the other hand, fared worse.
It’s entirely mete to know that Douglass Wilder, in 1989, a Democrat, became the first African American elected to a gubernatorial post in the United States. That’s right, peeps. Virginia, that bastion of bigotry and racial prejudice, that ignorant heap of shitkickers, elected the first African American governor in 1989 – almost two decades before David Paterson was appointed and at a time Derval Patrick was just getting into young fatherhood. But when Governor Wilder – today, the Mayor of Richmond – condemned McDonnell’s actions, in the words of a Buffalo woman, transplanted to Virginia and unhappy there, Wilder was a “Republican tool.”
Am I angry about McDonnell? In the words of a well-known sage, you betcha. I’m chewing nails and spitting rust. I was even angrier when I read the account of his actions in The Richmond Times Despatch, a paper long known for its conservative stance, who roundly condemned this governor’s actions; but I was angrier at the degree of support he seemed to receive from the commentators participating in the online version of the paper.
There was a veritable Civil War going on there, and it was getting pretty ugly. Then I read some of the comments again. Many of them began with “My great-grandfather fought in the War of Southern Aggression …”
That’s when I realised something.
These people are old. When you’re great-granddaddy fought for the South, you are old. Maybe some of these men even remembered Great-grandpappy. And there’s no reason why they wouldn’t be computer-literate, themselves. There is such a demographic as silver surfers. Of course, they were arguing the moot point about the War not being about slavery, but about states’ rights etc; but the ultimate truth was that the War was fought because the Southern states demanded their right to extend slavery into the new Western territories, by manifest destiny, whilst the Federal government’s attitude of the day was to contain slavery, as abhorrent as it was, in the agrarian South, and allow all new territories to be slave-free zones.
If you scratch the surface of the United States of the ante-bellum era, you’ll find a lot of unrest amongst certain tranches of Northerners regarding freeing slaves as well. This was a time of western expansion in the United States. It was also the time of unfettered immigration from Europe, chiefly from Germany, Austria and Ireland, to the United States. There was a great anti-immigration feeling amongst people who considered themselves “natural-born” United States citizens, especially in that immigrants provided cheaper labour, and freed slaves would provide even cheaper labour.
I recognise, as well, that simmering beneath the surface of these elderly gentlemen’s righteous indignation, was consternation at the fact that a black man was sitting in the Oval Office.
Well, that’s also the modus operandi of the Tea Party movement, something which is now spreading its tentacles nationwide, North and South, East and West. It’s subtly hidden, of course, but we saw it in the Northern crowds who turned up to cheer Sarah Palin during the Presidential campaign, carrying stuffed Curious George toys, re-named “Hussein” for the occasion. Their poster boys and chief cheerleaders are the likes of Palin, herself, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh … and none of the above is remotely Southern.
It’s an ageing demographic who can’t get to grips with the changing overall racial portrait of the United States. It’s nice to think that this generation is dying off, but experience has proven that attitudes and mores can be passed from one generation to another. In Britain, people whose parents weren’t even alive during the Second World War are raised to detest the Germans. The English cordially hate the French and vice versa based on a war that ended in the Fifteenth Century, and don’t even start on Catholics and Protestants. So, regrettably, there will always be people who think that the Caucasian race is superior to any other. Some of those people, invariably, will be from the South. And some will be from the North, too, which has seen its share of race riots, conveniently forgotten in this diatribe against a state.
For the record, here are a few things people in the North and the South should know:-
First of all, for all you Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, this one’s for you. They guys’ hero is John S Mosby, the Gray Ghost, himself. Quite a few SCV chapters are named after him. The gals all love Belle Boyd, the famous Southern spy. Literally all the UDC chapters bear Belle’s name. Well, I’m well familiar with Mosby and Belle, having grown up amongst their old stomping ground. I wonder how many people know that Mosby, after the war, became a staunch Republican (bad word in the South in those days) and ended up serving the Grant Administration. That’s Grant as in Ulysses S Grant, who took Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
And Belle escaped to England during the war and married a Yankee en route – not just any Yankee, but a serving Yankee officer. And when he died, she married another; and years later, a third. She made her living post-war, much the same way Sarah Palin’s making hers today – giving public talks, for which she was paid, mostly to veterans of the GAR – that’s the Grand Army of the Republic, to novices, a euphemism for the Yankee army. So Belle was the Sarah Palin of her day, a fully paid-up media whore, who had a heart attack and died in Wisconsin before a scheduled address to another group of Yankee veterans.
In other words, for them the Civil War ended in 1865. They accepted the fact that they were on the losing side and went on to make capital from it.
Secondly, as there seems to be a plethora of people from the North intent on heaping hate on the South, and on Virginia, in particular for this incident, I’d say this: that these people are the selfsame ones who, previously, had been found heaping the hate on the President and all who surround him, calling for a primary challenger in 2012, threatening not to vote, calling him a Republican and all sorts. These people seriously need to deal with their cognitive dissonance, and not substitute it for irrational hate for a specific demographic. These people seriously need to remember that three of the last four Democratic Presidents were from the Deep South, and one was responsible for two of the most Progressive pieces of legislation in the 20th Century. In fact, of the 8 Democratic Presidents to serve in the 20th and 21st Centuries, four were Southerners and one was from a border state. Think about that.
Also, cogitate upon this: Bob McDonnell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. True, he moved to Virginia when he was one year old, but he was an army brat. He spent the early part of his childhood on army bases in Germany, before returning with his parents to settle in Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, or NoVa. Like another Philadelphian, Chris Matthews, he’s a practicing Roman Catholic.
Virginians are born not made. We tolerate people who live and work in our state as “Virginians” inasmuch as they contribute to the economy, but a real Virginian is one who is born there, or – at the very least – one whose mother was a Virginian. Sorry, if that sounds snooty, snobby or exclusive, but in the words of a fellow real Virginina, Bruce Hornsby, “That’s just the way it is.” We just about extended the status of “real Virginian” to Tim Kaine, because he married a woman, from Virginia, whose parents are not only real Virginians, but whose father was actually a real Republican governor of the state (as opposed to Dixiecrat-turned-Republican), who became a Democrat.
And settling in NoVa gives McDonnell the added epithet of being a “phoney Virginian,” which is what residents of that area are considered by people born in the State. So, lil’Bob, like his crony Ken Cuccinelli, bona fide scion of the Jersey shore, are what the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their ilk would have deemed, in other times, to be Carpetbaggers. In fact, as political pundit (and Virginian) Larry Sabato pointed out, McDonnells ancestors were still in Ireland when the Civil War occurred. If they were in the United States, chances were that they were conscripted to serve the Union.
Is Bob McDonnell racist? I don’t know. Probably so, I would say; but I would venture to say that that perceived racism came as much from his own background – remember Jack Murtha’s remark about racism in Pennsylvania? – as from any time spent in Virginia or any association with Virginians.
So, all you people up there on the moral high ground want to shut up and think about what you’re saying when you’re labelling Southerners – and Virginians, in particular in this instance – mindless morons, bigots, hillbillies, whatever – that you’re sounding just as intolerant, narrow-minded and exclusive as those people you seek to criticize on the Right. A friend of mine, an ardent liberal and real Virginian, whom I’ve known through high school and university, recently that the one group of people whom liberals/Progressives could criticize, taunt and condemn with impugnity were Southerners, and in doing so, they totally negated the fact that there were, indeed, liberal Southerners, from Huey Long to Ann Richards, from Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter, from Bill Clinton to Robert Gibbs, the Alabamian Press Secretary who works for the nation’s first African American President.
So, maybe we should all be thankful for Bob McDonnell, because he’s opened up the can of worms labelled “racism,” and – as someone said in the early days of the Obama Presidency – maybe it’s time that this nation sat down and actually addressed racism in an open and honest debate. Maybe Virginia needed McDonnell, because his retrograde opinions on race, women’s issues and sexuality will force those people who couldn’t move their asses to the polling booth in 2009 to mosey on down there and pull the lever for progress in 2010 and thus move the state forwards into the 21st Century in spite of Bob McDonnell. And maybe the whole country needs him too, if only to show those recalcitrants what the people are left with, when others decide to sulk out the vote.
I am a born Virginina Progressive, and I approve this message.

A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose ... Cognitive Dissonance, Much?

I feel curiously vindicated after reading Frank Rich’s column:-
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04rich.html?hp
My cognitive dissonance theory of the unreasonable attitudes towards the Obama Presidency by some quarters on the Left (notably the base) is entirely justified in one paragraph:-
“… a friend who is a prominent liberal Obama supporter sent me an e-mail flipping my point. He theorized that race also plays a role in ‘the often angry and intemperate talk’ he has been hearing from ‘left-liberal friends for the past many months about what a failure and a disappointment’ the president has been. In his view, ‘Obama never said anything, while running, to give anyone the idea’ that he was other than a ‘deliberate, compromise-seeking bipartisan moderate.’ My friend wondered if white liberals who voted for Obama expected a ’sweeping Republicans-be-damned kind of agenda’ in part — and he emphasized ‘in part!’ — because ‘they expect a black guy to be intemperate, impetuous, impatient” rather than ‘measured, deliberate, patient.’ ”
There you have it! It’s official, or quasi-so. Many of the so-called Progressive Left, hovering around the base of the Democratic Party assumed they were getting a jive-talking, street-suss black dude, who’d kick ass six ways til Sunday amongst the recalcitrant and hideously white Republicans. They thought they were getting Shaft and Cleopatra Jones sashaying into the Blue Room, and they’re disappointed to find out (in their own estimation), that they’ve ended up with Johnny Mathis and Leslie Uggams.
The whole of the Obama-bashin’ fashion has been a lesson in cognitive dissonance at its best and a veritable example of the sort of narrow-mindedness that’s been allowed to develop over the years on what is normally assumed to be the all-embracing, ueber-tolerant Left … and that’s a bit of cognitive dissonance too.
According to Rich, Obama is a Rorschach test – as a candidate and, subsequently, as a President. According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in their best-selling work, Game Change, Obama was the ultimate tabula rasa. Either way, it amounted to the way the Left’s base perceived Obama: Basically, he was everything to everybody. He was what we wanted him to be. Whatever hopes, dreams and encouragements we fostered, we projected on Candidate, and then President, Obama.
In a curious way, this justifies John McCain’s campaign interpretation of Obama as the celebrity, the rock-star. How many of us harboured adolescent fantasies of a singer or an actor, projecting whatever puerile views we held at the time onto the fragile shoulders of a Jagger, a McCartney or even an Elvis? Thus, we stared in utter amazement and wonder whenever Obama gave a major speech … and never heard a word he said.
The television in my British office, the day after Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, tuned to the BBC, replayed the speech, the cameras lingering on the upturned faces of the faithful in the crowd, each and every one smiling beatifically. A colleague of mine noted wryly: “They look like they’re in some sort of a religious trance.”
So it was easy to be disappointed, once the deed was done, for many, when Obama set about fulfilling what, essentially, were campaign promises.
Healthcare?
“He promised single-payer! He did! I heard him!”
(Sorry, love, no, he didn’t. He actually said that single-payer would be ideal, if we were starting from scratch with a total reform of health services in general. That’s not a promise).
Afghanistan?
“He promised to end the war!”
(Yes. He promised to bring the troops back from Iraq and concentrate, instead, on the so-called “good” war, Afghanistan – you know, the one we were well on our way to winning and stabilising before George Bush got addicted to Iraq and non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction).
It didn’t help matters that the Left’s base were led in song by totally irresponsible reporting and comment by so-called celebrity pundits, who deliberately misinformed them and kept them in a perpetual state of bickering, second-guessing and discontent.
I have to cite Bill Maher, who started the cognitive dissonance ball rolling down the precipice with his “Patriot Editorial” of November 14, 2008, when he made a comparison between the newly-elected Obama and Canadian premier, Stephen Harper, in totally ghetto-esque terminology, exclaiming, “Take that, Canada! You’ve got some boring white dude named Stephen Harper, while my President is a kickass, black ninja named Barack Hus-SEIN Obama!”
By June 16, 2009, Maher was forging the path of Obama-bashing, getting his oar in with the first overtly critical editorial of the President, basically criticizing nothing of policy, except the fact that, in Maher’s view, Obama had done nothing since entering office, except buy a dog for his kids. Had he bothered to do proper research, instead of currying a reaction which would lead to various appearances on other pundits’ shows (and thus garner some publicity for his own program), he would learned from Poltifact that Obama, actually, was doing really rather well in keeping a lot of his promises and accomplishing that which he’d set about to achieve. Instead, this started a litany of lament from the base of the Left, who took Maher’s word almost as law, and carried the crescendo of complaint to a new level, which remained continuous until the end of the year and beyond.
In hindsight, and compared to the damage limitation that’s been one of the key elements of Real Time since it began its new season, it’s now easy to see how Bill Maher was a victim of his own cognitive dissonance – he voted for Samuel L Jackson and got Bill Cosby. “Is this as good as it gets?” he wailed in November of last year, all the time wanting Obama to assume the mantle and mantra, the swagger of Bush, which, in Obama, would have translated into the angry, black man.
Now that the President has achieved what he sought, with healthcare reform, and in the way he wanted to achieve it, to Maher and the other capricious pundits such as Ed Schultz, he’s got his mojo back; he’s punching his weight and upwards. This is behaviour which they’ve cognitively associated with a black man from Chicago, street-suss and sassy; it’s familiar to them and identifiable with their assumption of what the behaviour of a successful black man should be, as summed up in Bill Maher’s most recent editorial in which he hoped for the President to deliver a message to the GOP that they should “kick his black ass.”
Taken further, we have the collective year-long critiques and moanings of Arianna Huffington about Obama’s ineptitude, his mishandling of the economy, his sell-out to Wall Street, his lassitude, his kowtowing to the Right in every way to please them. She went as far as to exhort Joe Biden to resign as Vice-President and lead an open revolt against the President and his Afghan policy, weeks before it was even decided and announced what the President was going to do.
Every move the man made or didn’t make was open to pejorative comment from Ms Huffington; his State of the Union was seen by her to be an artfully constructed sell-out to big business and the banks too big to fail. Every word of criticism, every second-guessed opinion, every time after endless time she appeared on the rounds of commentary shows from This Week to Wolf Blitzer to Olbermann to countless, countless appearances on the ubiquitous Ed Schultz, she prefaced her incendiary remarks with a pithy little sigh, taken straight from the repository of sounds made by white-gloved Southern ladies of the Junior League variety in the early days of racial equality … the sigh that implied, “Well, what did you expect … from a BLACK man?” As far as Huffington was concerned, this Presidency was seminal in that it was the first (and, Huffington hoped, only) affirmative action Presidency.
The blogosphere, weaned on a diet of infotainment, cleverly disguised as cherry-picked news, lapped this up and spewed it out until it became viral. They looked for any elected official from the Democratic Party to break rank and criticize Obama, they plotted primary challenges, threatened to sulk out a vote, some even teamed up with Teabaggers. In fact, Huffington did much and is still doing much in the way of trying to emphasize that the Progressive Left really does have a lot in common with the Teabaggers, considering their anti-Wall Street stance, and that similarity should be cultivated – when in fact, the only thing the extreme bases of the two parties have in common is that they’re being manipulated and misinformed by people whose only agenda is furthering their own publicity and professional careers.
The base of the Right is laughed at by its seemingly superior counterpart on the Left, because they take to the streets with pictures of Obama sporting a Hitler moustache, calling him a Nazi; because they depict him as a witch doctor and call him a communist; because they fear he’s a socialist, that he wasn’t born in America, that he’s sinister … when anyone with half a brain knows they cannot accept the fact that a black man is in the Big Chair.
Yet their brothers encompassing the base of the Left protest this President because they don’t understand why he’s doing literally everything he said he’d do, when, in reality, the black man in the White House isn’t black enough to fit their perceived stereotype.
And I don’t know which is the more insulting viewpoint.

How Long Is a Piece of String?

So the evidence stacks up against the Vatican’s spin that the issue of child abuse by priests wasn’t merely an American problem, as they were wont to have us originally believe.
I could have saved them the trouble and told them differently.
Paedophilic priests have been part and parcel of Catholic life since the god in which they believe was a boy. That’s a fact. Systematic abuse of children has been taking place under the Church’s protective auspices equally as long and throughout the scope of the Catholic world.
A priest was removed to another diocese when I was a seventh-grader at the local parochial school. That was in the mid-Sixties. He taught us music. We never knew exactly why he left. He was there before Christmas, and he was gone in the new year. My father told me he’d gone because “he liked little boys too much.” Such was my innocence at the time, I didn’t know what he meant. I do now.
A decade later, over lunch whilst studying in Spain, the topic of homosexuality came up. This occurred in the last days of Franco’s regime, but my host family was an enlightened one. During the discussion, I recall one brother remarking to the other: “And the priests! You remember the priests and what they got up to …”
I have always believed that certain careers were more vocations than professions, where people had a particular knack or calling to serve in a particular field – teaching, for example, or medicine, certainly religion.
When I taught school, teaching was often considered a transient profession, one which many people used as a means to a professional end. With finances scarce for gtaduate or professional school, people often taught for a few years in order to accumulate funds for a law or medical school degree. Others, indecisive about what they wanted to do in life, often acquired a teaching qualification in order to tide them over financially until they really found a career that sparked their interest. Sometimes these transients turned out to be quality educators. One of the most inspirational teachers I ever had in high school was a young man teaching biology as a means of financing subsequent medical school studies. Three years later, when I was a first-year coed at the University of Virginia, he was in his third year of medical school there.
But sometimes, transients weren’t the best of teachers; they were the worst. At best, they’d leave after a couple of years, moseying on down the road to try something else out professionally; at worst, they got tenure for some reason and drew a salary at the expense of a child’s education. Or worse.
I don’t know why it seems, all of a sudden, that the Catholic Church attracted an undue amount of paedophiles amongst the ranks of the priesthood. People can argue that it’s down to celibacy, but sexual scandal has encompassed various Protestant denominations and still does, and Protestant clergy are allowed to marry. Just as a lot of people shouldn’t be in the classroom teaching, a lot of people affiliated with the religion in a clerical capacity, shouldn’t be. Maybe they were pushed in that direction by their parents; maybe they genuinely believed and wanted to serve.
At the end of the day, it transpires that they were all deeply, deeply flawed human beings, who were allowed to get away with the worst kind of sexual offences imaginable: the systematic rape and torture of children.
When one thinks of child abuse in the Catholic Church, one normally thinks about priests kiddy-diddling little boys; but girls suffered also. The Magdalen Laundries in Ireland are a living testimonial to that – where families were enticed by the local parish to commit their daughters for the slightest of peccadilloes – either real or imagined – and there they stayed, often until they reached an early grave; and there they suffered, mercilessly, at the hands of nuns.
The first seven years of my educational life were spent under the tutelage of nuns. Some were excellent teachers, but some of the older ones didn’t spare the rod either. My parents, products of the same school, always told me things were worse in their days. I know now that a lot of these women who entered religious orders did so, primarily, because there was nothing else they could do – which basically meant that there was no man on the horizon to take them off their parents’ hands. If you couldn’t be a bride of a man, better yet to be a cold-hearted bride of Christ and take your frustrations out on a myriad of curious and bright children in various degrees of verbal and physical abuse.
It’s said that a nun so terrified and terrorized the current Vice-President as a child, because of his stammer, until his own feisty mother took matters into her own hands and threatened violence against the woman. Joe Biden was lucky he had such a mother.
Others had parents, so in thrall to the teachings of the Church, that when a child ventured to speak of the unspeakable to his mother or father, they refused point-blank to believe anything had happened, and that the child was giving vent to evil imaginings. I daresay, this is what the Church intended everyone to think. After all, the clergy and religious in question had taken vows. If they were tempted in the flesh in any way, this temptation came from the lay community, even if that meant sexualising an innocent child.
And that leads to another reaction by parents, whose children confided abuse to them. Until recently, to complain to one’s bishop about the unwonted attentions of a priest on a child, would have only resulted in the priest being removed to another parish, and the bishop apprising his replacement with a warning to keep an eye on the family who’d made the complaint, marking them down as trouble-makers. And so the parents would make a decision to leave the Church, to remove the child from harm’s way and hope for the best, tacitly sweeping the incident under the carpet in hopes that the incident – out of sight – would soon be out of everyone’s mind.
Well, we all know that life doesn’t work that way, and psychological scars are those which never heal.
I don’t know what will happen with all this, except to say that, at present, the Catholic Church is acting like the thief who got caught with his hand in the till and apologises profusely for getting caught. An entire lifetime of Catholic theology, dating back to the mythical St Peter, the first Pope, is hingeing on this one. That the current Pope was aware of all the shenanigans and responsible for the cover-ups of the past thirty years is without a doubt; but now he’s Pope, a person whose infinite wisdom is supposed to be infallible.
Someone suggested he should be excommunicated, but only he can do that, himself. He could resign, but that would never happen – to do so would denote fallibility instead of the opposite, which is the basic tenet of the Pope being God’s representative on earth. Most people, and probably most Catholics, don’t believe in the fact that God needs a representative here amongst us who mirrors God’s perfection, and maybe something could be done, ultimately, in the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
But whatever is done will be precious little to rid the victims of abuse of the scars they’ll carry until the release this mortal coil, nor will it assauge some of the guilt their own parents may have felt at their inadvertant actions, which they did, genuinely believing that they acted in the interest of their child.
There are a lot of recovering Catholics, angry both at religion and at their God.
Happy Equinox.

Shut Up and Listen

I had a Voltaire moment earlier this week. It was one of those moments when I paused to realise that my education had not been in vain, but it shocked me nonetheless because I actually found myself defending Ann Coulter.
Not that I like or agree with anything Ann Coulter might ever say or venture to say, you understand, but on this occasion, I felt she was worth defending.
I had read about her speaking tour of Canada and of how the president of one of the three Canadian universities where she’d been scheduled to speak, had written her an e-mail warning her that freedom of speech in Canada wasn’t quite the same thing as it was in the United States; therefore, basically, Coulter should tone her message, and the words used to convey it, down a decibel. The e-mail left a subtly understood phrase “or else” hanging at its end like a dangling participle.
This e-mail prefaced her tour, but the next thing I heard was that this selfsame president had actually cancelled Coulter’s appearance, due to an incident that had happened at the university where she spoke immediately before his institution.
Coulter had been speaking at the University of Eastern Ontario, when – during a Question and Answer sesson at the end of her speech – she was confronted by a 17 year-old Muslim student who asked that Coulter justify a remark made in one of her previous books, asserting that Muslims should be forbidden to fly, post-9/11.
Whilst I’m no fan at all of Coulter’s and I’ve never read any of her books (nor do I plan to do so), even I understand that, more than anything, Coulter is a satirist – albeit, a satirist from the Right end of the political spectrum. The satire in her works is extreme, to say the least, but a lot of political satire pushes the extreme in its limits. Even pundits such as Joan Walsh and Alan Colmes have recognised this facet of her work. The fact that most people from both sides of the political coin, who’ve read Coulter’s writings, don’t recognise this as satire and buy into a serious reading of her message, marks her out on the Left as a whackjob and on the extreme Right as the Queen Mother of the message they hope to convey.
The plain truth is, I imagine, that she’s neither.
I’ve no doubt that she’s a Republican or that she’s a conservative, but I’ve every doubt that she drinks the koolaid she sells. Coulter’s schtick, like most pure satirists, is to provoke a reaction, and her works certainly do just that. They provoke horror and revulsion amongst the Left. On the Right, these people recognise her as giving voice to a lot of thoughts they’ve harboured, but never found the courage to express vocally. To the people on the Right, Coulter’s their Bill Maher, who happens – in real life – to be a particularly good friend of Coulter. In fact, Maher’s said on several occasions, that once someone’s spoken with Coulter, and taken the politics out of the situation, it’s easy to see exactly from whence she’s come and where she hopes to take her message.
And that’s directly to the bank.
In truth, I don’t suppose Maher or Coulter differ very much in real political perspective: they both support the death penalty and racial profiling, they are both anti-union, don’t approve of government-controlled healthcare and are virulently against government funding of the arts. Both have been extremely vocal critics of George Bush. Yet Bill is considered and calls himself a Progressive, and Ann is readily identifiable as a Republican. Maher’s espousal of the legalisation of pot and same-sex marriage saves him from being branded as a Republican, but doesn’t exclude him from being accused of being a closet Blue Dog.
Anyway, the serious Canadian adolescent demanded Coulter justify her remarks about Muslims not being allowed to fly. As if she were unable to believe the content of the question, Coulter paused for a moment, before replying, “And here I thought it was only American schools that produced ignorant students.”
The nuance in the reply was clear. The remark was satirical and not meant to be taken literally. Maybe this was the first time Coulter was presented with someone taking the supposed veracity of the statement to heart, and that someone happened to be a po-faced first-year university student. In retort, the student took the argument one step further.
“I’d just like to know,” she began, “how I’m expected to travel, being a Muslim.”
Coulter gave a wise-assed reply that summed up her estimation of a sublime moment descending into the realm of ridicule.
“Flying carpet,” she quipped.
It was snark.
But still, the student demanded mollification. “But what if I can’t afford a flying carpet?” she continued. (I mean, why not ask “how long is a piece of string” while you’re at it).
Finishing off what had evolved into a conversation truly worthy of theatre de l’absurde, Coulter finished by telling the student to “take a camel.”
The next day, Coulter was informed that her second engagement, at the University of Ottawa (whose president had sent her the e-mail), had been cancelled.
Allegedly, students raised a protest, demanding that she be allowed to speak, but the president wouldn’t be budged, even though several of this group recognised the fact that she should be allowed to give her point of view in the speaking engagement already booked.
Local publications and the Huffington Post implied that the cancellation was due to the exchange with the student at the University of Eastern Ontario, which was pretty silly to say the least. It was a conversation, based on a question posed by a pretty intelligent kid, who’d probably never read anything Coulter had actually written and who’d pounced upon the remark taken out of context and taken personal umbrage at it on face value. Understandable. I, quite often, take umbrage at the blanket assumption of many people on my own side of the political fence that all Southerners are Rightwing, incestuous, fundamentalist Christian and stupid. I’m certainly none of those things, and I take exception to the inference.
But the kid, having never read whatever book from whence that statement came, either didn’t understand that Coulter’s works were satirical (and straight satire is, quite often, not intended to be funny), or – if she had read the work – she didn’t understand satire in general. Was she wrong to have asked the question? Probably. Certainly, she was wrong to challenge someone on a statement made in a published work, without either having read or understood the work, in question.
And Coulter was probably wrong to give the answers she gave – certainly, the initial answer, which implied that American students were stupid and inferred that Canadians were also. In actualy fact, a remark like that reeked of something Bill Maher would say – only in that instance, the audience intended, both sides of the 44th Parallel, would have howled with glee and nodded in agreement.
Huffington Post reported the incident in an article, which was repeated on their Facebook page. Immediately it appeared, the article was inundated with comments from both Canadians and Americans, alike, the majority of them calling for Coulter to be silenced, commending the Canadians on quelling Coulter’s voice and wishing there were some way America could shut her up. Some clever clogs, an American, remarked that the fact that the Canadians had, effectively, denied Coulter her right to speak, implied that they were actually better than Americans, and this comment was followed by several, expressing a desire to move to Canada.
Why?
Healthcare?
Or the fact that the Canadians appear not to have anything remotely resembling a First Amendment, so they can silence any remark they deem to be particularly offensive anytime they choose?
On Bill Maher’s MySpace page, a regular Canadian commentator dove in, feet first, with a gloating remark, pungent with sarcasm, at the triumph of the Canadians not to tolerate racist remarks and condescendingly explaining to the Americans peopling the forum that in Canada, they have race hate laws that forbid this sort of thing.
Well … wait a moment.
Let’s look at what Coulter said.
She actually didn’t declare during the speech, that she thought Muslims should be prohibited from flying. This was something brought up by a member of the audience. Her initial response – that Canadian students were probably as stupid as Americans, which surprised her – held no racist or racial content. Was it rude? Yes. Offensive? Most definitely, to Americans as well as Canadians, and the exchange should have stopped at that point, and Coulter should have moved on; but she allowed the student to persist, in what proceeded to become an almost surreal conversation.
Were the “flying carpet” and “camel” remarks racist? I think they were intended to be sarcastic, and their intent was probably to shut the kid up, implying that the initial question wasn’t worth a serious answer. Coulter could have stopped and laboured a point with the student that her work and the comment, therein, were satirical; but Coulter’s a single woman, pushing fifty, who’s never been married or around students since she was one, herself. She’s the product of a private education and the holder of an Ivy League degree. She probably assumed that anyone attending a university ought to have some concept of satire, or she should have realised that the kid had probably never read the book she was querying. A good reply would have been to ask the student if she’d read the book, and to suggest that she do so before attempting to analyse and question a controversial remark, taken out of context.
So were the remarks racist? Not really. Stupid. Ignorant. Almost puerile, yes, but racist, no.
Anyway, the gloating Canadian commentator on the forum was just advertising his own ignorance in his remarks, because Muslims are not one particular racial group. A Muslim is a follower of Islam. “Muslim” is a religious term, not racist. Keith Ellison is an African-American (by race), who is a Congressman and a Muslim. His religion is Islam. Sarah Joseph is a British author and lecturer, who is Caucasian (by race) and who is also a Muslim. “Jihan Jane”. John Walker Lindh. Mike Tyson. Salman Rushdie.
If you take Coulter’s remark literally, all of those people would be denied access to travel by aeroplane.
Did Coulter’s remarks imply or incite religious hatred? Not at all.
Canada probably does have race hate laws, much in the same way the UK does – laws, which prohibit direct incitement of hate against people for reasons of race. There are also laws in the UK, which do the same, regarding religion. Maybe this is true in Canada as well, but Coulter, in this instance, was guilty of nothing more than silly, snarky remarks.
What is disturbing about this entire incident is the readiness, the eagerness of the people on the Left to silence any sort of controversial viewpoint that isn’t in lockstep with their own views. Lockstep is supposed to be something identifiable with the Rightwing. We’re supposed to be the Big Tent. Yet when I made a remark, recently, on another forum, in support of Markos Moulitsas’s view that Dennis Kucinich’s eleventh-hour obdurance, which threatened passage of healthcare reform, was not helpful to the cause, I had several people, who prided themselves on their own tolerant image, go viral on me. This is tolerance? Not much.
The Coulter incident reminded me of an observation Coulter’s sparring partner, Bill Maher, made about a year ago in an interview with Howard Kurz – how it always shocked and alarmed him that the people most vocal in wanting to deny First Amendment rights to opposing viewpoints were young college-aged people who purported to be from the Left.
These seem to be the same demographic of people who are expressing a longing to move to the Canadian Utopia, more or less, for what they perceive to be “free healthcare”. That’s another fallacy being promoted by Canadians, who should know better, one of whom is the selfsame Mr MySpace, who pronounced upon Coulter’s remark. He’s gloatingly gone on record, as have many other Canadian commentators I’ve read, staking bragging rights to Canada’s “free healthcare”.
It’s not, and he knows it. Free at source, yes, but “free at source” doesn’t mean “free.” It means you pay for it, beforehand, via taxes, doofus. Regrettably, a lot of Americans buy into the “free lunch” notion attached to this, so maybe Coulter does have a point about American and Canadian stupidity.

Pussy Fear and Penis Envy

One of the things I admire most about Bill Maher is the ability he has to make one think. He has a way with words – he would, having been an English major – that at first infuriates or intrigues a listener, but which then implants a thought in one’s mind that simply refuses to go away until the listener strikes obedience and thinks about the sense (or lack of) in the remark. It provokes an almost dichotomous thought pattern, because if you initially agree with something he’s said, by the time the next Real Time rolls around, you’ll be thinking otherwise; conversely, if you initially disagreed with his opinion, after a week’s cogitation, whilst you might not agree, you’ll certainly understand how he arrived at a stated conclusion.
I look and contribute to both Bill’s MySpace and Facebook pages, and I read a lot of the comments and criticisms made by other fans, and sometimes, they make me think too. This is what happened this week.
A regular commentator on the MySpace page criticized Bill’s handling of an incident which occurred during the panel discussion.
Amy Holmes was one of the panel guests on Bill’s show last week. She’s pretty much a dependable regular on Real Time, appearing at least once per season. I definitely get the impression that Bill’s having trouble securing panellists this season; as much as he had the same problem last year, this year it seems to be worse. Already, we’ve seen faces so familiar they probably have personal possessions stored someplace in the Real Time studios.
I’ve never been able to stomach much of Amy Holmes. Five minutes of listening to her regurgitate what amounts to rote-learned rehashings of whatever the current GOP talking points happen to be, drive me to imbedding my fingernails into the fabric of the nearest wall. I find her, at worst, to be a snooty, entitled, walking advertisement for everything that’s pejorative about Affirmative Action – at best, to be the poster girl for Republican diversity.
But I always felt she had a bit of a crush on Bill Maher and that he had a thing for her also. He’s got form for conservative women, after all, considering his long friendship with Ann Coulter and his mommy-fixation on Arianna Huffington. (Look, she’s as Rightwing as Rush, only she hides it better. Leopards never change their spots). Whenever she appears on Bill’s show, she gets her points across in a sing-song-y little girl voice which reduces Bill to soft-peddling a retort which always begins with the exasperated phrase, “But, Amy, you’re so bright …”
That phrase always niggled me, whenever he used it, and he used it almost exclusively with Holmes. I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why it annoyed me. She certainly is bright. She’s articulate. She’s got a more than decent education. The fact that he constantly felt the need to refute her party political rhetoric with an allusion to her intelligence just irritated me to no end.
And now I know why.
The panellists on Friday were Holmes, Gary Johnson, the Republican former governor of New Mexico, and the actor Hill Harper. Bill initiated a discussion about global warming, concentrating on the Right’s constant denials about this trend and illustrating it with the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, depicting a cover cartoon with a nude Al Gore in arctic surroundings.
Holmes immediately took up the baton of the deniers, jumping into the fray with both feet, employing her usual tactic of talking points, emphasized with facts, figures and fiction – speaking loudly, interrupting and muscling in on anyone who dared to speak. The whole argument lasted around 8 minutes, and consisted mostly of Holmes going into meltdown (pun intended), Bill trying to get a word in edgeways, Hill Harper briefly making a point so sensible it was rendered forgettable by the Holmes machind in overdrive, and the ineffectual Governor just sitting in silence, only once interjecting a mild point in support of the denialists’ theories.
Inevitably, the subject green technology and job creation entered into the equation, which introduced China into the discussion and the fact that they were leading the way in both green technology and jobs, as opposed to the United States dragging its heels and bogged down in debates as to whether or not the actual condition of global warming existed. Holmes refused to admit China’s progress.
“I’m not seeing any of that,” she maintained.
Then came the killer punch from Bill: “Then you don’t read."

That wasn’t the end either. Later, whilst speaking with the fourth guest, author John Heilemann, Bill relayed an anecdote about an altercation on a plane between Presidential hopeful and Mormon, Mitt Romney and a rap artist, which resulted in the rapper being asked to leave the plane before take-off. The story illustrated nothing more than a third-class dust-up the the First Class section of a plane between two first-class pricks. As Hill Harper opined, Romney probably should have been asked to leave the plane as well, but Bill played up the racial aspect of it, bringing in – as always – a pejorative religious stance.
Remarking on the fact that Mormons allegedly view the black population as morally inferior, being descendents of Cain, their black skin evidence of the infamous “mark of Cain,” Bill tried to imply that Romney’s confrontation with the rapper had its roots in the Mormon belief of black racial inferiority.
Holmes made a cack-handed attempt to defend Romney, and Bill’s verbal machinations resulted in her awkwardly defending the politico against racism as well. When she protested that she wasn’t wantonly defending Romney or Mormonism, Bill prissily sniffed, “I would hope you’d be defending black people!”

He almost sounded like a disapproving, maiden aunt.
Whilst I’ve no liking for Holmes and, in a purely political sort of way, I enjoyed the smackdowns, I enjoyed them in the sense of watching an articulate conservative being deftly and effectively silenced by a more articulate, intelligent liberal. I even commented as such on Bill’s MySpace page, and another commentator, also a woman, made a similar remark.
But someone else saw it differently. A male commentator, an ueber-liberal, himself, saw Bill’s behaviour toward Holmes as rude, citing her intelligence as deserving of respect, whilst at the same time, reminding Bill of his own chivalrous defence, the previous year, of Meghan McCain, in the face of a smackdown by Paul Begala.

The commentator went onto shame Bill for his rebuke of Holmes, whilst castigating him defence of McCain, who – he said – really was stupid and deserved to have her ass verbally smacked by Begala for making what was, essentially, an immature remark.
And that’s when I realised that Bill had essentially patronised and disrespected both women on this occasion, and that it was wrong of the commentator to chide Bill for what was two cleverly exhibited facets of the same type of behaviour: misogyny. Equally, it was wrong of the commentator to deem one woman deserving of respect because of her alleged intelligence and the other deserving of scorn because of her stupidity. In a curious way, he was being patronising too.
First of all, both Holmes and McCain have Ivy League degrees – Holmes from Princeton and McCain from Columbia. In fact, I’d go as far as guessing that both women each probably graduated with grade point averages superior to any accumulated by Bill Maher at Cornell. Bill’s grammar, syntax and spelling in some of his writing are nothing short of disgraceful in someone who got a degree in English.
Secondly, Holmes is a good decade older than McCain, who – at 24 – was the youngest panellist to appear on Real Time. McCain’s nervousness was apparent for all to see; in fact, she twittered in the hour before the show that not one of the waiting guests bothered speaking to her, except for the journalist, Joel Stein. It’s easy to imagine Begala and Katty Kay, the only other woman on the panel, cosying in a corner of the Green Room, exchanging whispered bitcheries about McCain.
When she made a particularly puerile observation in her nervousness, Begala pounced, but Bill’s over-exaggerated defence of her from ‘that bad, bad man” was not only patronising, it was humiliating. In one instant, she’d become the kid at the adults’ table, whose presence was suffered with great patience and forebearing, but who needed, now and then to be reminded of her rightful place. She was the dumb blonde, the bimbo.
This is a woman, who is an Ivy League graduate, an author and a columnist in her own right. She may have got a leg-up from her old man’s name and political position, but having got the leg-up, she’s managed to stay where she is and hold her own.
With Holmes, the treatment meted was more openly meaner and just as undeserved. The remark about reading, whilst linked to Holmes’s party line defence of the climate change deniers, also implied a wider stupidity. It bought into the standard attitude assumed by the Left that anyone who is on the Right side of the political fence is ignorant, benighted; that that ignorance is willful and, therefore, deserving of disdain.
In her previous appearances on the show, Bill’s reaction to Holmes’s rhetoric was weary bemusement. He was the kindly, tolerant liberal guide trying to ease her into seeing the error of her ways. Now she was just another soulless member of the Dark Side, and her cack-handed attempts to respond to Bill’s assertion that because Mitt Romney was a Mormon, he must also be a racist (as assumption any other conservative would have treated with the contempt it deserved) resulted in her being tacitly identified and exposed by Bill as being an oreo, ashamed and almost admitting to bearing that ubiquitous mark of Cain.
The treatment meted both these women was derogatory and a mixture of pity, revulsion and condescension, a view that both were ignorant creatures who needed either protection from themselves or exposure of their inadequacies.
Neither of these women deserved this, and it’s difficult to imagine Bill treating Tucker Carlson or Michael Steele the way he reacted to both these women.
I’m not surprised at the level of misogyny prevalent today, either in the media or in politics. After all, Bill’s fellow Cornell alumnus, Keith Olbermann, was recently taken to task by Jon Stewart for referring to Michelle Malkin, another obnoxious conservative voice, as having a face “like a beaten-up piece of meat with lipstick”. And if Bill ever bothers to read John Heilemann’s Game Change, so prominently displayed on the bookshelf behind his desk, he’d realise that the two most intellectually astute people in the Senate recently, besides Ted Kennedy, were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the one most universally disliked and disdained was Clinton.
Pussy fear? More than just a bit all around.

Real Tense Real Time

Real Time with Bill Maher hit the boards running for its eighth season a couple of weeks ago, and I held out great hopes for my favourite fundit program, after a decidedly iffy season last year which ended in confusion.

However, I’m hoping I didn’t speak too soon, as it stalled in what it sought to deliver in the third episode of the season, which aired Friday evening.

A commentator on Bill’s MySpace page deemed the episode ‘caustic’, another friend of mine thought it was ‘quirky’ more than anything else. I thought it just oozed tension, and I’m at a loss to understand why.

To begin with, the guest list was a bit thin on the ground – three guests in the studio, including the one-on-one interview and a satellite interview with a dodgy connection. I think Bill struggles to get people to commit to appearing on the program, and whether that’s the nature of the host or the venue (Los Angeles is as long a flight time from the East Coast as New York is from London), I don’t know.

We’re three programs into the new season, and there’s yet to be a elected politician to appear. The result of this difficulty is that we keep seeing the same recurring guests, almost as ‘regulars’: most of the guests who’ve appeared already are repeat performers.

I approached this week’s instalment reluctantly. Arianna Huffington was a panel guest, and to say I loathe this diehard neocon corporate media whore disguised as a Progressive voice only when it became openly fashionable to hate Bush is being kind. The last time she appeared on the show last season, in the cohorted company of fellow (open) Republicans Darryl Issa and Jack Kingston, that trio so railroaded the discussion sequence that Bill, the host and moderator, was reduced to looking like a cross between a bewildered child at the adults’ table and a confused spectator at a tennis match watching such a never-ending volley that he’d forgotten who had the serve.

I’m still at a loss as to why the media in the US continue to give this intellectual lightweight and parvenue airtime to spout her ridiculous talking points, made only to enhance her own publicity; but then, I remember when Mrs Huffington, minus the ex-husband’s divorce settlement and the Wall Street hedge fund, was merely Miss Stanisopoulous, the daughter of a corrupt Greek politician, trying desperately to be taken seriously as an arch-Right conservative by the truly Progressive, serious British media intelligensia.

They considered her a joke.

Bill’s guests this week, besides the Queen Mother of Media Whores, included Andrew Ross Sorkin, financial correspondent for The New York Times, Sean Penn and (from New York) Michael Moore.

Although his previous two monologues this season had hit the bullseye for which they were intended, Bill’s monologue this week fell curiously flat. He wittered on about Oscars’ week, with the inevitable Sarah Palin joke.

I know Palin was a particular target and bete noire for Bill during the campaign and he eviscerated her shallowness with brilliant panache; from time to time, she surfaced last season, but only when she’d done something to merit newsworthy comment – like resign.

This time, I’m getting the uneasy feeling that Bill’s baiting Palin, almost stalking her with continuous snarky comment and open ridicule, and for a curiously self-serving purpose. Of late, those whom Palin has targeted with her snide and ill-founded observations, have achieved almost victim status – Letterman, Rahm Emanuel, Seth McFarlane and Family Guy – all rose like phoenixes from the ashes of her ignorant remarks and misconceptions.

In short, Palin’s invective got publicity for both Letterman and McFarlane, and even Rahm was seen in a more sympathetic light as almost an arbiter for freedom of speech.

Bill’s not above promoting himself shamelessly, almost by any means. That he compromised himself greatly last season with a blatantly opportunistic editorial, slating President Obama for ‘not doing enough’ a mere six months into his Administration, was all too obvious, especially if one cared to remember that the week previous to that particular editorial (June 16th), he was roundly criticizing the GOP for saying the very same thing about the President. Still, it achieved the end Bill desired – he ran the gamut from Blitzer to Olbermann, starting the Obama-bashin’ fashion that the base of the Progressive Left adopted with a fervour unseen since they campaigned for the man during the election.

A lot of real Progressives today still blame Bill for sounding the hammer blow that created a very noticeable ructure in the Democratic Party.

I think Bill is baiting Palin for the same reason. He’s relishing a response from this woman. He wants her to target him, to point a finger, to Twitter a tweet or sully her Facebook page with a diatribe against big, bad Bill Maher, which would gain Bill a soupcon of sympathy and a gaggle of publicity. Thing is, I get the impression that Palin isn’t much of an HBO fan, and I seriously doubt she’s even heard of Bill. Were I he, I’d leave off Palin. He’s only feeding fuel to her fire, and besides, as a part of his monologue and stand-up, she’s becoming boringly predictable as a reference.

But after the monologue, the atmosphere began to become almost surreal.

Sean Penn was the first guest, booked to talk about his humanitarian effort in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti and to plug the relief organisation he had established for that purpose.

I found this odd, to say the least, especially since one of Bill’s ubiquitous tweets during his hiatus had criticised the continuous news emphasis on the disaster by the mainstream media, to the exclusion of any other news. I understood Bill’s complaint; he’d reiterated the media’s propensity to flog one news item like the proverbial dead horse, but the tweet did come across to many as the whiney complaint of a bored adolescent. The other thing I found odd about the interview was Penn, himself.

Penn, florid of face and neck, with a dull, dazed look in his eye, was clearly drunk. More than that, he was a woozy, rambling, incoherent drunk.

To Bill’s credit, his interview questions were flawless. Under normal circumstances, he would have been pushing the right buttons, with the questions he asked. but circumstances were anything but normal. The result was that Penn’s answers rambled on ad nauseam, and he never truly answered any question.

For example, when Penn finally got to the point of his first answer – that the United States needed to give more, more and yet more again to Haiti in an effort to rebuild a viable infrastructure there, Bill, rightly, countered by asking Penn why he sought to concentrate his efforts on Haiti, when there was ample evidence of infrastructural decay in the United States and a plethora of Americans suffering badly as a result of the dire economic crisis.

Valid question; in fact, one many people have been asking in light of this.

This elicited another incoherent and torturously twisted reply from Penn, the gist of which being that by giving – yes – more, more and more again to rebuild Haiti, the US would be a better nation and benefit and learn from the Haitian people. Learn what, exactly, he never specified, and it’s doubtful that he knew. By that point, Penn was just phoning in his replies.

The interview wasn’t without controversy, however. Finally, Bill brought up the subject of Hugo Chavez, a particular ‘friend’ of Penn’s and one whom the actor has defended vociferously. The ensuing reply on Penn’s part is a testimony to the fact that, just because one is an extremely talented actor and icon for a generation, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the person has any great intellect, or even basic common sense.

Bill referred to Chavez, the dictator.

Penn quickly took umbrage. Chavez, he replied, in a pique, was most definitely not a dictator, but a legitimately elected head-of-state. In Penn’s mind, that’s not a dictator.

I disagree. Hitler was legitimately elected. So was Mussolini. So was Bush, allegedly. And elections can easily be rigged to favour the strong man who wants to rule. Look at Italy’s Berlusconi. Again, look at Bush and the Republican techniques. I’m sorry, Sean, this dude’s a dictator and a dick.

Bill then pointed out the fact that Chavez had shut down television and radio stations and newspapers who were openly critical of him, but Penn would have none of that. In fact, he declared, anyone in the United States, and especially in the media, who insisted on calling Chavez a dictator, should be put in prison.

From where I’m sitting, it looks as though Sean’s close association with Hugo Chavez hasn’t been for nothing. That’s a blatant denial of First Amendment rights - so are we to infer that the humanitarian and Academy Award-winning actor approves of a suppression of Freedom of Speech? What a walking advertisement for the Left in the face of the Right. And a blatant one as well.

The other interview came midway through the panel discussion with Michael Moore. It was beset by satellite difficulties, as Moore was attempting to be broadcast from New York City, outside Goldman Sachs. Bill was clearly frustrated by the delay, and Moore was frustrated as well, although by what, it was unclear. It was a tetchy, almost irascible interview, from the beginning, done to publicize the fact that Moore’s latest cinematic offering, Capitalism: A Love Story, was now available on DVD.

As the impending Oscars ceremony served more as a veritable Banquo’s ghost than as a backdrop to this episode, Bill began the interview by reminding Moore that it was Oscars weekend and that Moore’s film hadn’t received a nomination – although he couldn’t imagine why, Bill added for good measure. Clearly a joke between friends, but Moore failed to see the humour and tetchily remarked that, for what it was worth, he thought Bill’s documentary Religulous should have won the Oscar the previous year. (It wasn’t nominated).

Moore then went into a diatribe about the evils of Wall Street and the sufferings of the ordinary citizen in the wake of that, which – for some reason – elicited an irritated response from Bill, in which he noticeably raised his voice. Thereafter, the four-minute clip tailed off with Moore remarking that he’d written a letter to President Obama – understanding that Rahm Emanuel was about to leave – offering him his services as Chief of Staff for the salary of $1 per year and a bed in the White House basement.

In the moments after the interview had ended, Bill made two rather snarky allusions to ‘St Michael’ and ‘the spirit of St Michael’, obviously on the tail end of what amounted to a locking-of-horns encounter, no matter how unintentional that was.

The surrealism of the episode was heightened by the fact that almost nothing of any newsworthy event referenced in the panel discussion. It was patently obvious that the panel was there only as a prop for Huffington to publicise her ‘Move Your Money’ movement in an effort to cripple the four big, bad lending banks.

I find Huffington faintly ludicrous at the best of times. She usually manages to muscle in on any discussion and dominate the proceedings, and this time was no different. Bill began the panel discussion by singling out her ‘Move Your Money’ meme, adding a bit of self-promotion for himself, considering that she asked him to do the promotional video which was released on YouTube.

Now we get to the funny part.

Bill asked Andrew Sorkin, author of the book Too Big to Fail about what he thought of the idea of a mass movement of people taking money from the big four bad boys and placing it in locally-owned banks and credit unions. Sorkin remarked that he thought, in principle, Huffington’s idea was a good one; however, there were drawbacks to her idea:-

First, if everyone ‘moved their money’ from the big guys to the small fry, the banks that formerly had been too big to fail, would ... fail, and that wouldn’t be good for the economy. Secondly, many of the so-called local banks weren’t actually independent entities, themselves. Many were part and parcel of the very organisation Huffington sought to scupper.

(Huffington’s always out to scupper someone or something which effected a perceived slight on her fragile ego. Her vendetta against Clinton in the late 90s came as a result of her husband having lost a Senate race to Barbara Boxer; her vendetta against Tim Russert came from Russert’s wife having outed Michael Huffington in an article years before his sexuality became common knowledge; her vendetta against newspapers arises from the newsprint media failing to consider her a viable and reliable journalist, in her own right. So I can only surmise that her vendetta against the big banks comes from some kind of cashflow problem, which they can’t help her remedy – or at least more from that than out of any concern for ordinary people).

Thirdly, Sorkin concluded, these small local banks and credit unions weren’t entirely clean, themselves – that they employed a stringently vociferous group of lobbyists, whose job it was to nobble Congress, and were, in fact, more opposed to the President’s idea of regulating the banking industry than the big guys were, themselves.

At that moment, Huffington chose to suffer from a bout of selective deafness, because later, in her internet newsrag, she trumpeted the fact that Sorkin had given a pontifical blessing to her ‘movement’ and agreed with her entirely, although he actually didn’t ... such is her arrogance.

That moved the discussion onto the plight of the middle classes, where Huffington held forth on the fact that anger directed at Wall Street was a unifying factor between the middle class and the Teabaggers (and, in doing this, somehow managed to make Michael Moore sound like teabagging material). There followed a five-minute discussion between Huffington and Bill about the sufferings of the middle class and how the government and financial crisis was failing them.

I’m sorry, but I was mightily offended by what amounted to a dinner party discussion between two faux liberals talking about a demographic of people of whom one had actually forgotten he was ever a part and of whom the other had no real contact in her daily dealings. It was a moment straight out of a grotesque Goya painting of two narcissistic egoists paying pithy lip service to the plight of the little people and giving themselves congratulatory pats on the back for having noticed that a problem exists.

Frankly, it was insulting.

This led further into an unusual discussion about an American reality television program, Undercover Boss, which Bill, in a rare moment of realising that he was born a son of the working middle class, found insulting to ordinary people, and which Huffington, surprisingly in her Zsa Zsa-plays-Lady-Bracknell mode, found enlightening.

The whole discussion was pointless, with respect to current events. It was an exercise in publicizing Huffington’s latest venture, an opportunity for Bill to reiterate and reinforce the fact that he really, really did like President Obama, but he wished he could have acted tougher last year – the same old same old complaint he’d whined about since June 2009, only not as forcefully. (Earlier last month, in an interview clip with Joy Behar, I noticed the best-seller Game Change on the shelf in Bill’s office. He’d do well to read and digest the content of this, because ‘No-Drama Obama’ is the President’s schtick).

The New Rules weren’t Bill’s best, and the editorial was a bit of fluff, which, in other circumstances, might have been funny; but in these current times, came across as Bill’s Marie Antoinette moment.

It was an extollation of Hollywood’s virtues as an industry that was entirely American and didn’t come cap-in-hand to the government asking for help. (Of course, it never dawned on Bill that the film which won the Oscar last year was not an American film, or that most films aren’t actually made in Hollywood these days, mainly due to excessive costs). He excoriated the Republicans’ current triviality of promoting their two rising stars (yet another reference to Sarah Palin) as having been a local beauty queen and a nude male centrefold. Hollywood deserved the big party that accompanied the Oscars, as ribald, rambunctuous and excessive as it could be, and the public be damned in its criticism. (‘Let them eat cake, anyone?’)

One of the core messages of the editorial was the fact that any celebrity in the town who openly admitted to being a Republican, was usually of the naff, z-list variety: the late Sonny Bono, Fred Thompson or Fred Grandy, whose chief claim to fame was having played Gofer in The Love Boat.

Amongst the ueber-cool A-listers, only Democrats could be found.

Forty-eight hours later, that left me wondering on what list Bill, whom I love dearly as a fundit, when he’s thinking for himself and not aiming to please others for his own plaudits, could be found ... not the ueber-cool A-list, if this tweet, made in the early hours of Monday morning, whilst moving amongst the exalted at an Oscars’ after-party:-

"Actors are just the bestest people in thw world! We are so lucky to be sharing the earth with them!! Fuck!!!" (Typos are Bill’s).

Sarcasm? Heavily laced. Bitterness? A smidgeon. Jealousy? More than just a bit.

Billy, I love the bones of you, and for that, I’ll rate this episode 7 out of 10, but – damn! – it must be a heavy chore being Arianna’s Gofer. You’re much better than that.